Frankly, this idea of a dream greenhouse came upon me quite casually. Much as we love our home here in Redding, Connecticut, we discovered a place which we felt we would like even better—a manor sort of place with stables, pools, formal gardens, a very charming old house, and seemingly endless rock walls. My husband and I fell in love with it—he, I think, because of a quarter-mile of trout streams, I, because it had a most charming greenhouse, the one I have been dreaming about. At this writing the entire project is still very much in the future, but we have hopes.
To be reluctantly honest, my greenhouse garden is not a brand-new idea. Mammoth conservatories are often planted as gardens, and so are the “plant rooms” now built into the more luxurious contemporary homes. Both are often show places, with plants brought in for display at the peak of their flowering beauty and, as they begin to fade, returned to spend the rest of the year in more utilitarian growing quarters. My garden would be a year-round project, the plants allowed to live through their natural cycles of active growth and rest without disturbance. We follow this procedure out of doors when we plant annuals over the spring-flowering bulbs; why not indoors, too?
Tropical garden in early stages with room for creeping ground cover and growing trees.
And, of course, there must be many hobby greenhouses already planted as gardens. I saw one near Boston, a fairly large one set into the side of a steep hill. It was a perfect piece of a desert, with the soil made suitably sandy and the curious cacti and other succulents growing as naturally as though they had never left home. Mrs. Ernesta Ballard has a small tropical greenhouse so realistically planted you feel as if you are in an exotic jungle the minute you step inside the door. But both of these places lack one important asset—room for the rocking chair and the radio with its soft music, things I hope I won’t have to be without.
A miniature garden in a glass-covered terrarium
This complete greenhouse garden may not appeal to you, or it may not be practical or possible. In that case, I urge you to try a smaller naturalistic planting of some sort, if only to get that “garden feeling” and see how happy it makes your plants.
As a substitute for that Boston desert garden, I filled a small section of one of our greenhouse benches with a suitable soil mixture and planted it with small cacti and other colorful succulents, with here and there an interesting rock or two. These plants never flowered so freely when confined in pots, never showed off to such advantage. But I made one big mistake. I failed to make allowance for the more lusty growth, and planted the garden much too thickly. In just a few months the garden looked not the least like a sparse and frugal desert, but more like a menagerie of scrambling, hoydenish pets.
